Feature description:
When retain player state setting is enabled and the selected play mode is shuffle if the user taps play on the album or playlists the queue should begin from a random track.
Problem solved:
A little bit (or actually a lot) of background information:
Currently there are two ways to play a playlist or album in a random order.
- The first way is to use the dedicated shuffle button. It creates a shuffled queue before beginning playback. This is great if you always listen to stuff in shuffled mode, but if not if you ever want to continue playing in the normal order after the current track, as you cannot “unshuffle”. This way also makes the shuffle button in the now playing view useless. As enabling it would just shuffle the already shuffled queue and disabling would return the queue to the initial, but still shuffled state.
- The second way is to never use the playlist/album/artist level shuffle button but instead always play the songs in the straight order and then enable the shuffle mode from the now playing view. It is even possible to have the shuffled mode enabled permanently by enabling the retain player state setting. However this has two slightly different behaviors depending on how you start the playlist.
- If you use the play button on the bar then the very first song of the playlist will be selected and then the shuffle will be applied to the rest of the playlist. But this shuffling is not random. I don’t know how to better explain it other than with an example. I have a rather large genre playlist with my favorite songs which are sorted by the display artist. It so happens that with alphabetical sorting the first artist is *Luna with 57 songs. If I enable shuffling in the now playing view with retain player state enabled and then press the play button for the playlist then the first 45 tracks of the resulting queue will be exclusively *Luna. More than that, as the queue continues further the shuffled artists would keep their alphabetical order – that is, after *Luna is done I would see a bunch of artists whose names start with “A” be shuffled among each other and only when they are almost completely exhausted the artists with names starting with “B” will begin to show up, then only they will be mixed among each other and then the “C” artists would crop up. This trend would continue until the end of the queue. Unshuffling and reshuffling fixes the issue. It is also important to note that this behavior is not unique to playlists shuffled alphabetically by display artist, but it was the easiest place to notice. If your playlist is sorted by title then when you reproduce the steps you will be listening at first to songs starting with numbers, then “A”, “B”, “C” and so on.
- However, if you manually select a song by tapping on it the shuffling is truly random and does not exhibit the prior outlined behavior, instead behaving similarly to that fix.
Despite the outlined quirk, this way of shuffling allows you to disable it and continue listening in the straight order.
The problem itself:
As was described previously if you rely on the now playing view shuffle feature, when you play your tracks by using the dedicated play button in playlist/album/artist view the first track is always the same.
Brought benefits:
The benefit is twofold. Firstly, by making the first track random when shuffling is enabled would provide a better user experience. Secondly, it seems to me, that randomizing the first track would completely sidestep if not outright fix the sorting issue that I’ve described.
Other application solutions:
Additional description and context:
I was originally planning to report this as an issue. But as was stated the proposed solution would fix the problem, so feature request it is.
This request is slightly related to another request shuffle --> continue album from this track
If the explanation of the sorting behavior was not sufficient or if you have troubles reproducing it I can provide a screen recording.
